This invention relates, in general, to business processes, and in particular, to the modeling and execution of business processes to accommodate unforeseen events.
Business process modeling enables the visualization, documentation, modeling and analysis of business processes for understanding and process execution. Business process runtimes, such as WebSphere® Process Server (WPS), deploy and execute business processes.
Robust process models can be created that account for a range of exceptional circumstances. The real world, however, is always more complex than anything that can realistically be captured in a process model. Unforeseen events, conditions and circumstances that can significantly affect a business do occur. For example, unprecedented changes in financial markets, natural disasters, political upheaval, terror attacks, etc. Calling out to rules systems can provide a level of indirection in the process, but still cannot deal with the unforeseen, which is not captured in the rules.
Today, there are branching constructs to allow models to account for a range of circumstances. However, there is no description of how to prepare for the environment entering a state for which the process model does not account.